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American Parthenon Tennessee's Tribute to a Greek Ideal, a Nashville Tourist Draw, and an Old Birthday Party Souvenir By Peggy Robbins Nashville, Tennessee, boasts the world's only full-sized reproduction of the Greek Parthenon. Inside it stands a statue of the Greek goddess Athena, the tallest indoor sculpture in the western world. What's the Parthenon, let alone Athena, doing in Nashville? In 1896, the State of Tennessee observed its 100th year of statehood, and the next year Nashville hoasted the Tennessee Centennial Exposition to celebrate. Tennessee's capital city had long been called the Athens of the South because of its many educational and cultural institutions, so the exposition's director general decided to build a reproduction of Athens' Parthenon for the exposition, to house an international art exhibition. In a few months a surprisingly realistic lath-and-plaster copy of the Greeks' great marble temple rose in Nashville. Called the Gallery of Fine Arts, it won the praise of visitors, and when the exposition ended and its buildings were being torn down, the people of Nashville demanded the Gallery be saved. So the city managed to keep the structure, built to last a year, standing for 23 years. The Board of Park Commissioners pushed the idea of building a "real Parthenon." Many Tennesseans said it was too ambitious a project for a city the size of Nashville while others insisted it could be done. The believers won out, and in 1920 the Gallery was torn down to make way for the "real Parthenon."
An enormous amount of research went into re-creating the Parthenon and its statuary. After the explosion at the Greek temple in 1687 (see sidebar), most of the broken sculptures remained in and around it until 1801. That year Lord Elgin, England's minister to Turkey, persuaded the Turks, occupying Athens at the time, to let him collect the Parthenon's broken pieces of sculpture. He sold them to the British government for £35,000. Known as the Elgin Marbles, the statuary became the most famous and highly valued possessions of the British Museum. In Nashville's Parthenon you can see the British Museum's mounted casts of the Elgin Marbles and the only complete set of the pedimental sculptures except for those in the British Museum. The casts, made by the British government, were brought to Nashville not only as an exhibit but as study-pieces for the artists who reproduced the finished sculptures now a part of the new Parthenon. Since most of the sculptures inside Athens' Parthenon were completely destroyed in the 1687 explosion, there was nothing to base reproductions on until it was learned that, 13 years before the explosion, a young French artist named Jacques Carrey, attached to the French embassy in Turkey, sketched all the temple's sculptures. Those sketches were in the National Gallery in Paris. Nashville artists responsible for reproducing the sculptures studied the Elgin Marbles, the Carrey drawings, Greek history, and contemporary Greek art. Inside the Tennessee Parthenon, the 42-foot Athena sculpture dwarfs depictions of the other Greek deities. The original Athena sculpture created in the 5th century B.C. was Phidias' masterpiece, and it was located in the Parthenon's Naos, or cella (the interior of an ancient Greek temple as distinct from open porticos and other outside parts), a space especially designed for it. Both the statue and the Naos were re-created in Nashville in the size, scale, and color of the original. It took eleven years to complete Nashville's Greek temple. It opened to the public on May 21, 1931, and has been open ever since. In its first month, it attracted over 10,000 visitors from 46 states and 12 foreign countries and now draws 150,000 visitors a year. In addition to the advanced scholars who revere it as a representation of the period of Pericles, one of the high points of the world history, and the vast number of adults who simply appreciate and enjoy its compelling beauty, many college, high school, and primary school groups visit it. Four art galleries, including the Lobby Gallery at the entrance, are on the lower level of the Parthenon, making it Nashville's foremost art museum. The larger of the permanent collections, The Cowan Collection of American Art, represents American artists Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and others. James A. Cowan, a Chicago art collector who grew up in rural Tennessee and visited the 1897 Centennial Exposition, heard a few years before his death in 1930 about the proposed permanent replica of the Parthenon. He gave his collection of 63 valuable pieces of American art to the city to display in the Parthenon, and they have been there since the Grand Opening in 1931. Floodlighted every night for an hour and a half, Nashville's Parthenon is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Some recall what a reporter of a leading American newspaper wrote about it soon after it was completed: "If I am ever so fortunate as to reach the Pearly Gates of the New Jerusalem I shall expect to find nothing more radiantly beautiful than the Parthenon at Nashville at night."
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